1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to videoconferencing and streaming/archiving systems.
2. Description of the Background
To have a meeting among participants not located in the same area, a number of technological systems are available. These systems may include videoconferencing, web conferencing or audio conferencing.
The most realistic substitute of real meetings is high-end videoconferencing systems. Conventional videoconferencing systems comprise a number of end-points communicating real-time video, audio and/or data over WAN, LAN and/or circuit switched networks. The end-points include one or more monitor(s), camera(s), microphone(s) and/or data capture device(s) and a codec, which encodes and decodes outgoing and incoming data, respectively. In addition, a centralized source, known as a Multipoint Control Unit (MCU), is used to link the multiple end-points together. The MCU performs this linking by receiving the multimedia signals (audio, video and/or data) from end-point terminals over point-to-point connections, processing the received signals, and retransmitting the processed signals to selected end-point terminals in the conference.
By using a videoconferencing system, e.g. a PowerPoint presentation or any other PC-presentation may be presented while still being able to see and hear all the other participants.
In an end-to-end visual communications solution it is advantageous for video conferences to be made available to wider audiences which may have entirely different time constraints. An example of this is an important meeting or announcement that needs to be available to all employees in a multinational company. This involves multiple time zones and many scheduling conflicts. A solution to this is a video conferencing recording and streaming system that can record video conferences for delivery at a time of the viewers choosing. For people who don't need to be directly involved in the conference the system can also stream it live as it is happening. The delivery method referred to here is streaming over the Internet or another local or wide-area network. One skilled in the art knows that streaming is preferred way to present live feeds and support broadcasts and multicasts (sending one stream to many viewers). In streaming, a user's machine plays data as it is received and may or may not then discard it. One of the primary goals of streaming video is to maintain real-time playback at various connection speeds. To make this possible, streaming media relies on different protocols and servers for delivery than are used for delivery of standard Web pages. Real-time Protocol (RTP) and Real-time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) are known as connectionless protocols, in which speed is more highly valued than accuracy. Streaming servers reduce bandwidth overhead by broadcasting data across a network without verifying whether it is actually received. RTP and RTSP, as well as other existing or proposed streaming protocols are within the scope of the present invention.
Presenting multimedia content by streaming data to computers through a web interface is well known. The data stream may be transmitted in real-time, or a play back of an archived content through a streaming and/or archiving system. Conventional streaming data is adapted for storage and distribution, and therefore the multimedia content is represented in a different format than for video conferencing. Hence, to allow for streaming and archiving of a conventional video conference, a system for converting the multimedia data is needed.
A streaming and/or archiving system for video conference calls is preferably provided with a network interface for connecting the device to a computer network, audio/video and presentation data interfaces for receiving conference content, a file conversion engine for converting presentation content into a standard image format for distribution, and a stream encoder for encoding the content into streaming format for distribution. The streaming and/or archiving system is further equipped with a stream server for transmitting the encoded audio/video content and a web server for transmitting web pages and converted presentation content to terminals located at nodes of the network. The streaming and/or archiving system is also adapted to create an archive file consisting of the encoded stream data, residing at local storage media or in a server/database, to enable later on-demand distribution to requesters at remote terminals over the computer network.
However, streaming and/or archiving system as discussed above have limited amount of resources. Whether it is implemented in software or hardware there will be a maximum amount of simultaneous video conferences the device can handle. This number is inversely related to the complexity of the recording/streaming task. That is, the more CPU intensive the recording and streaming tasks, the less of them the system will be able to handle simultaneously. In many cases however, these kinds of CPU intensive tasks produce more desirable outputs. For example encoding normal and extended video sources into a streaming format such as Windows Media is resource intensive, but produces an output that can be delivered to a large number of people over a range of bandwidths and without the need for additional plug-ins or codecs to be installed on client computers.
Deployment of a videoconference distribution device in large installations may require many more simultaneous outputs than a single device can produce. Adding more systems to increase resources is a logical step, but also increases the complexity of dealing with the total solution. All devices must be managed separately, so carrying out administration tasks for each of the deployed standalone devices involves a duplication of effort on the part of the administrative users. Each standalone device has its own Graphical User Interface (GUI) which increases the probability of end users trying to access the wrong interface to perform routine tasks, such as creating and gaining access to the recorded/streamed content.
One way to deal with multiple standalone streaming and/or archiving systems (1, 2, 3) is to have an intermediate management system (4) that manages the interaction between all the standalone devices (1, 3, 3) and for providing a common user interface 5 for the user, as shown in FIG. 1. However, this requires a separate system (4) altogether and provides one point of failure. In addition, the streaming and/or archiving systems (1, 2, 3) are still treated as individuals by the video conference systems (not shown). Each of the streaming and/or archiving systems (1, 2, 3) has its own addresses, and a user must know several different addresses to connect to in order to utilize all of the streaming and/or archiving systems (1, 2, 3). Further, if the first streaming and/or archiving system (e.g. 1) dialled by the user is out of resources and unable to handle the call, the user must start all over and dial one of the other streaming and/or archiving systems (e.g. 2 or 3).
Hence, current solutions involve managing all systems independently, or using another external control system to manage them all. The disadvantage to this is that the task of interacting with and administering the devices becomes more complex and time consuming as the number of devices increases.